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Curative Analysis: ‘Own IT’ for February 2018

The Curative Analysis team in IT is tasked with finding the causes of significant IT issues that affect campus. In this news update, we draw your attention to some of the problems being investigated or issues handled recently.

Wireless connectivity: Clients issues with Eduroam on two occasions this month. On January 9, Eduroam certificate authentication experienced a brief interruption causing clients to be unable to connect to wireless. The issue was quickly resolved after a group policy update in reimport Eduroam certificates into Active Directory. On January 13, a second issue occurred with Eduroam where clients could connect to wireless, but were unable to access the internet. The issue was caused by a high volume of multicast traffic. IT networking staff were able to optimize settings on our wireless controllers to reduce the overall load.

Phishing Attempts: January 2018 has seen a 250% increase of phishing campaigns coming to WCU. Several steps are being taken to provide a more secure environment for our users. The first step is to turn on Multi-factor authentication (MFA) off-campus for all employee accounts by February 28. MFA for student accounts will be turned on in Fall 2018. Along with requiring MFA for off campus, we will also be turning on Modern Authentication on April 2, 2018. Modern Authentication, when combined with MFA, provides an additional level of security.

Blackboard Collaborate: On January 16, the vendor Blackboard which hosts Collaborate experienced an outage, causing all universities who use Collaborate to experience error message when logging in or when trying to access Collaborate. The vendor identified that their automated software deployment tool had inadvertently pushed out the wrong version of their software. The vendor immediately reverted to the correct software version and has added additional steps to the automated deployment tool to prevent a future occurrence.

Equitrac: On January 23, we began receiving reports that several faculty and staff were being prompted for a release key when trying to print to PAW Print printers. As a workaround, changing the installation of Equitrac to disable “Release Key” and enable “Client Billing” resolves the issue. Our Equitrac automated policy push has bee disabled as we research and work with the vendor to determine the cause